I will always regret never hearing your best secrets...

The silence of my finger grazing over the bump on my chin that doesn’t belong there is broken by the sound of air conditioners clicking on and off while a car alarm banters in the distance. I’m agitated by the nothing that I feel about all the something that exists in the world. Suddenly, I understand Emily Dickinson and it occurs to me that I’m over stimulated. Like an orgasm that never ends. Like childlike jokes that induce states of happiness that perpetually irritate the academic that lives inside my brain. All of these things induce images of melting clocks in the desert of my mind. I sip my beer, shaking my head.

All the triteness in the world is accentuated by my friend on the other end of the phone. He names me as special when all I want is to not feel that I am lonely. The loveliness of the world exists only in the shadow of the stale, hollow wo/men who run the ins and outs of it. The hollowness in these wo/men did not exist there until they allowed it to consume them. They are the enemy and the hope. They are the ones I desire to speak to but to whom I will never speak. Even those who understand the state of mind in which I contemplate and thrive will not have me. Another image rouses my neurons; the picture from my seventh grade history textbook of the edge of the flat world on which those before Galileo dwelled. I picture myself there, just as I am now; seated on the edge of the world with my feet dangling from the side of it, sipping my beer and rocking slightly back and forth as if to find comfort. Should I put down my beer and jump? Should I get up and walk back from where I’ve come? Or should I just keep sitting there? I don’t know what to do, so I am writing.

Though now, in retrospect, the edge of the world looks more like a piece of poo.